107 - Men Against Time: Berdyaev, Eliot, Huxley, and Jung

Men Against Time:
Berdyaev, Eliot, Huxley, and Jung
By Douglas K. Wood
Lawrence, University of Kansas, 1982. 245 pp. $30.00.

This is a remarkable book for several reasons. It constitutes in itself an impressive example of the history of ideas stemming from the twentieth century reaction against the notion of inevitable progress, which Dean Inge labelled a superstition, and others thought an ersatz religion. It provides us with an exposition and analysis of not only the ideas of four different figures of great mark but also of their histories, and thus invites us into the creative thinking of a Russian philoso-

108 - Men Against Time: Berdyaev, Eliot, Huxley, and Jung.

pher, an American - born British poet and dramatist who won the Nobel Prize, a brilliant novelist and mystic from England, and a world - famous Swiss pioneer of psychoanalysis.

What provides the unity of this well written book and its absorbing interest is that all four of these thinkers argued against the current domination of time for a way out of time which would not be social escapism. in so doing. each underwent a "conversion" of sorts. Berdyaev escaped from a Marxism that would establish a classless society into the spiritual conviction that God would apocalyptically turn time into eternity. T. S. Eliot's disillusionment with The Wasteland of post - war Europe and The Hollow Men was also converted to Christianity, as an Anglo - Catholic, and came to believe in the non - discursive circle of the dance, which imaged for him the transcendence of the linear mode of time and history. Both he and Berdyaev had known the mystical moment when time was overcome. Aldous Huxley's original fascination for the natural sciences (in which his brothers were such distinguished names) led to a conviction that Eastern mysticism - of the Vedantist variety - with the aid of mescaline, could lead to a transpersonal unity with the Ground of Being. Jung, himself the son of a Protestant minister who lost his faith, came to believe that individuation of the personality was possible by appropriation of the unconscious archai or patterns, thus also conquering time. These fundamental changes are analyzed with subtle nuances, and incidentally provide the reader with an introduction to the genesis of a philosophical theologian, the development of a great poet, the efflorescence of a novelist - philosopher who expounded the wisdom of the East to the West, and a psychoanalyst who pioneered a journey into "the mind of God," if one may use St. Bonaventura's title for the pilgrimage of Jung.

The book is written with a vivid and pellucid style combining reason and imagination. My only criticism is to wonder whether the anti - temporalism of the four authors is so exclusively a twentieth century phenomenon on a large scale, as Wood suggests. In the Roman empire it was apparent in the gnosticism of an alienated elite incapable of coping with time. In the eighteenth century Romanticism glorified nature, intuition, and imagination in a Promethean rebellion, while later still in the nineteenth century the philosophies of Schopenhauer, Carlyle, and Nietzsche sought to attain transcendence of time and the self. In any case, this is only a fly in amber. This book should be of absorbing interest to those who like to think.

Horton Davies
Princeton University
Princeton, N.J.